NickDG

"It's only string, rag, and savvy that keeps me from being a paragraph in the morning paper . . ." That was something I wrote a long time ago. Since that time I've heard many people trying to determine the "price of BASE" but first, I think, we might consider the "reward of BASE." And I don't mean all that "we can fly" and "it's our history and birthright" crap. I mean that feeling you get pulling your canopy out of the air after a smooth flight and greaser touchdown on Main Street at 4:30 in the morning. I mean that feeling you get watching the next jumper freefalling the glass face and wondering, gasping really, how we do such a thing and then laugh about it . . . The price of BASE is injury and death. You will be visited surely by one, maybe not both, but that's the way of it as of October, 2004. I could go on, but I must start packing for Bridge Day . . . NickD

>>have you tried LSD? well i think half an hour after lsd....peaking at the door, you are one mad person to be doing this....i can not imagine anyone surviving a jump on LSD

"You can fly?" "Yes, Lois" "Like Peter Pan?" "No, Peter Pan flew with children in a fairy tale." Sweet dreams, Chris, thanks for all the inspiration. NickD

http://www.basefatalities.info/ Nick BASE 194

>>laughing so hard I thought I'd split wide open. "Two kwesadilllllllas. . . "

>>BEIJING, Oct. 6 (Xinhuanet) -- When Ding Jianping jumped from the top of the Jinmao Tower, 345 metres in the air, yesterday, China's first BASE jumper was born.

>>I figured THAT must be what Frank was talking about when he thought it a good thing we all hadn't met..YET!!

I've never heard it called, "breaching the peace." Nick

The below is the only arrest for BASE jumping in Yosemite I've heard of this summer. We must be getting better at it . . . Nick

Frank Mott was President of the Marine Corps Parachute Club aboard Camp Pendleton, in California, the "Falling Eagles" they were called when I first met him. I was already out of the Corps but he was doing my rigging, before I became a rigger myself. I showed up at one of their demo jumps on the base. I got a haircut and just showed up. I was a local and very current demo jumper and just wanted to jump a Huey again, the bird I did my first freefall from when I was student, but before I knew how cool turbine helicopters were. Colonel Henrey, I'd taken the photographs at his wedding, told me not to bounce, or it would be their careers. I walked into the ready room and right away somebody was giving me the stink-eye. Although I'd gotten a haircut, my mustache was too long and here he comes. A Marine Major and he stops an inch or two from my face and says, "You're not a Marine." "No Sir, I'm a Corpsman assigned to a local ship." I fibbed. "What ship? "The John Paul Jones," I said as innocently as possible . . . hoping that was actually the name of a current ship in the fleet. I landed and gave Marine Corps General Poggemeier the thumbs up before I got the hell out of there . . . And then I discovered BASE jumping . . . Nick

OMG! The Strato Flyer . . . When that didn't work, Para-Flite turned it into a reserve called the, "Safety Flyer." The ad slogan should have been. "You'll live! But always take a real good pasting on the landing . . . Nick

Hi Craig, I meant to e-mail you Al's post as I know of your interest in this sort of thing. I found Al's post with Goggle's "advanced search." I searched the year "1984" and only in the newsgroup "net.rec.skydive" Nick

My first square is a Strato Star I bought from Marilyn Wuest's father in 1976 at Lake Elsinore. I had a hundred and ten rounds jumps then on Cheapoes, Piglets, PCs, and Paps when then you needed a hundred round jumps before you could jump a ram air. It was all red with one off set gold (yellow really) cell and I gave him $400 for it. It was incredible. I was master of the universe, as I carved turns for the first time, and the wind speed came back to my ears . . . Nick

Last year Frank was dong Tandems up in Cal City . . . he's a freaking Iron Man. And he's always been that way since I met him in 1977 or so . . . NickDG

We were still jumping up in Ramona and I'm bent over and packing when a strange van slides to a stop in a big cloud of smoke. Back slides the door and out tumbles Mark Sechler, Alan Ricther, and about five others, also in a big cloud of smoke. Frank Mott looks my way, spits out a ball of tobacco juice and says, "Something's up at Perris." Nick

>>I'm guessing the L-bar risers are stronger but has there been problems with the large 3-rings (integrity) that would make the L-bar necessary?

Coming a bit late to the internet myself (1986) I found the following older USENET post (from the very person that started it all) interesting in that it mentions a time when there are only three skydivers posting to net.rec.skydivng (which later became rec.skydiving) from 1984 . . . Nick >From: afg@druxo.UUCP (afg@druxo.UUCP) Subject: Count me in too.... Newsgroups: net.rec.skydive Date: 1984-04-13 08:02:09 PST Several years ago I started this group, but the whuffos kept sending me mail saying they would never jump out of an airplane. I guess it got old. By the way, I like blast handles, providing I am using a 3-ring or R-2's. Now that I know there are 3 other jumpers on the net, are any of you folks familiar with the AFF program. I have watched about 20 jumps from the air, and was very impressed. Has anybody heard any negative information? 20 jumps is not enough to really make a decision, unless you are trying to TSO a reserve, :-)! -- Al Gettier AT&T Information Systems Labs 11900 North Pecos Denver, CO 80234 (303) 538-4771

>>Just wondering... has there ever been one. or an unreported incident anyone knows about?

I saw Cat Stevens in concert in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1974. I loved his music. Although I must honestly say I don't recall his performance all that well as Cheech & Chong was the opening act . . . Nick

Okay, now this is too much . . . Peacetrain, anyone? Nick

I feel less afraid of dying now at fifty years old than I did at twenty. However, I find myself taking less chances now than I did then. I'm not sure why that is. I do hope to wind up on the bottom section of my own LIST in a quiet and dignified manner. My fear now is that dying by parachute, at this stage in my life, would be like stamping "Big Dope" on my forehead before closing the box. I think by virtue of what we do, and how much we are exposed to it, we feel a bit smug towards death. Early BASE jumpers were warned to make death your friend, or else it would became an all consuming enemy. The average wuffo attends the occasional funeral, a grandfather, an aunt, or an uncle, but in addition to those we jumpers attend services for the many who have passed before their natural time. In a sense this extra exposure, I always thought, makes us tougher, but that's not true either. At the service for (Tommy's) Jan Davis, I cried like a freaking baby through the whole thing . . . In the end I think BASE jumping has as much to do with death as anything else does. And I think the harshest form of demise is when it comes young. When I recall those who died jumping twenty or thirty years ago, in terms of today, I can't help but feel bad due to what those years would have meant to them in terms of lost loves, lost laughs and lost good times. No, don't be afraid of death, it's a big semi truck heading your way sooner or later anyway. Just do everything you can to avoid stepping directly out in front of that truck too early. Let the wuffos see BASE jumping as a crap shoot when we know it's a skill. Let them wonder how we risk it all for what they see as nothing. Sometime in the next hundred years, or so, good historians will start to "get it" and ascribe to us a grand title, a declaration that we are the first ones to act on that age old dream of human flight. And we came damn near to getting it right. So, please, when I'm gone, on my headstone I'd like this written, "It's cool, I knew this would happen." Nick

Sometimes the difference in people's perceptions needs only a few years, and not a whole generation, to be very different. I joined the Marines during the height of the Vietnam antiwar movement and like many in my age group I joined at a young age. This is before I became politically or socially aware. (You know, that time when you change from thinking the world revolves around you, and realize you are only part of the whole scheme of things). In October of 1970 my biggest concern is fast girls and fast cars. Most Sunday afternoons at my house consisted of a black & white WW II war movie watched on TV with my Korean War Veteran father followed by a wonderful roast beef dinner served by my doting mother. In my mind that roast beef was a direct result of those guys charging and dying on the beaches of the movie I just saw. That perception was further aided by father always including them when saying grace. Outside my little Leave It To Beaver world the ones protesting the war are older than I. They are college age and better and they are gaining steam as their ranks swell with returning war veterans coming out against the war. So I sat there with father riling against the protesters and draft dodgers, while Mother scooped more peas and carrots onto my plate. "Let's hurry, and finish up," Mother says, "we don't want to be late." Down the street my best friend's older brother just returned home from Vietnam and the neighborhood was turning out to welcome him. We'd also heard that he'd been wounded. I'm thinking all the local girls would be there and I'm disappointed when I can't drive myself over in my own car. "We are going as a family." Father declared. So there he is. Twenty two years old, except for around his eyes, which seemed much older. He's tall, ramrod straight, and looking like a decorated Christmas tree in his Marine Corps dress blues. He says little except thanks for coming, he never smiled, and we young ones stared too hard at his empty left sleeve that is pinned back to the elbow. My mother went to sit in the car because she was crying. I didn't sleep so well that night. I felt like I had to do something. I cut school the next day (I was in the eleventh grade, and not doing so well in High School) and went to see the local Marine Corps recruiter. When he found I had just turned seventeen he said one of my parents would have to countersign my enlistment papers. "Don't call my mother," I said, "call my dad." By the next January I had graduated with Platoon 2006 at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina and finished the advanced combat courses at Camp Lejeune. My entire platoon then received orders that would result in service in Vietnam, except for me. You had to be eighteen to serve in combat and to my displeasure I was only seventeen years and four months. I was so disappointed I was ready to stow away in someone's sea bag. My platoon buddies said don't worry kid, they'd wait for me, and they promised to save some gooks for me kill. (I apologize for using that word, "gooks," but that was the mindset of the times). My orders instead sent me Denver, Colorado and Combat Photography School. After that I spent two years at Camp Pendleton in California. The war was winding down and I was missing it. I requested a transfer to Vietnam every two weeks but there is little hope as President Nixon is beginning to withdraw troops, not send them. But something else was happening to me as well. I had now worked and lived with many combat veterans who are telling me how much I had lucked out. I also slowly got regular word that another member of my boot camp platoon had been killed or was missing in action. The country around me (in 1972) seemed firmly against the war. And I was beginning have doubts too. I was growing up. In 1973 I'm in Hawaii and I'm assigned a mission to the Philippines to photograph returning American POWs. At Clark AFB I watched them come off the plane, this group included John McCain and they are all officers, except for one lone enlisted man. When I wondered about that I was told enlisted men weren't generally taken prisoner. I also wondered for the first time why some of these guys had to spend up to 12 years as prisoners of war. The seeds that something was very wrong with this war are beginning to sprout in my mind. Fast forward to 1975. My transition from gung-ho young Marine to being 21 years old and firmly against the war is complete. The evacuation of Saigon in April of 1975 is the last thing I'm involved with before my discharge from the Marines. We, as a country, finished our twenty year involvement in Vietnam by leaving behind thousands of in-country supporters and many of those later met unmentionable fates. Almost half of my boot camp platoon, and indeed some of the best of my entire generation, are now just names etched into a black wall. I don't automatically believe what I read, or hear anymore. That freedom was taken away from me along with my innocence. I now only see the vision of George W. Bush sitting in the back of his Yale college classroom in 1972 wearing his bomber jacket and chasing pussy when the rest of us are doing the heavy lifting. John Kerry returned from Vietnam a man of his generation. He knew, like most of us, that the war was wrong. And he did something about it. That took a personal amount of courage, because if you participated in killing people, and you believed the cause was not just, then what did that make you? What do you call people who kill people? How do you live with that? Many Vietnam Vets hold onto the course that it was my country right or wrong. A mechanism that allowed them to make peace with themselves and to go on with their lives. There are a few things in life that are irrevocable. Taking a life is one of them. There is no going back from that. You alone, not your country, or some long out of office President, carry that around for the rest of your life. When I read what some of you write here on this board I see myself thirty years ago. The main problem with us humans is we don't take the lessons of history to heart. We keep having to learn the same things over and over again. Today is Sunday, September 18, 2004, and while writing this with my radio on, I just heard 29 Marines were killed in Iraq this week. Somewhere my mother is sitting in a car and she is crying . . . NickD BASE 194

>>Bollocks. Seems like I was drunk again last night.......

"Where no information exists any is welcome." I don't know who said that, maybe it was me? Very well done, I thought, and it gave me the shivers . . . Nick

>>I try to fly out tomorrow and it sits in my passporto.